Found
by JWAB
Summary: After Shado dies and Slade doesn't, Oliver contends with the man Slade has become and remembers when things were better. But the past and present have a way of telling the same story. Slash, my dears.
1. Found

_The only liberty I'm taking here is that Oliver gets a haircut on the island. Because I cannot with his hair. Oh, and that Slade and Oliver got it on a ton. But that's clearly canon._

_I blame/thank latbfan and CreepingMuse for this.  
_

**Found**

I did this to him. It's my fault.

He tracks me, finds me when I'm alone. He speaks less and less. The Slade I knew is disappearing. What's left? Need and hate. A ghost.

* * *

I ached from our training. I had bruises up and down my ribs, on my thighs. My knuckles were cracked and bleeding. My hands were too sore and weak to grasp. It hurt to breathe. But he needed me to be faster, stronger. He needed me to be his partner if we were going to escape.

"Do you want to be useless like you were when I found you? Or do you want to live?"

Once I chose it, chose not to give up, he dug in.

"Again," he growled as I hit the ground. "Get up."

Slade expected everything. Our lives depended on my success. I tried, really tried, for the first time in my life.

After three painful, frustrating days in the field, I turned a corner. I was less distracted. I had learned how to focus, what to look for, how to predict his next move. Like a sixth sense, I started to feel him twist in the air across from me, behind me. I could meet almost every strike.

His face softened. I thought I saw a sliver of respect. Maybe even hope.

* * *

Today he sucked me so hard I was sure he'd tear my dick off.

Sara hasn't said anything but she's got to know. Something.

* * *

"Don't get comfortable, kid." His voice was gravel in the dark fuselage. "Can't lose your focus."

It was probably three in the morning. He always knew when I wasn't sleeping. He never slept.

I knew it was about the kiss. That afternoon, our eyes had locked for too long. I wrapped my sore, mud-crusted hand around the base of his neck, where it was widest, where it sloped into his shoulders, and pulled us toward each other. His lips opened against mine. I felt the tremble in his breath. It wasn't just me.

Lying there hours later, I let his admonitions echo in the silence.

His next words were inches from my face. "So don't."

And then he kissed me. He pressed my head back against the ground with the strength of his jaw while he slid his hand down my side, my thigh, down to my knee and then slowly back up to my chest.

When I reached out to touch his neck, he left.

* * *

I miss the way he used to look at me, in the weeks before Shado came. Like he knew the dirtiest thoughts in my head and could beat every one of them.

* * *

You can hear everything in the fuselage. There's no hiding. But a few nights later, as silently as I could, I took off every layer of my clothing. Each silent step toward him was like balancing on a tightrope.

"What are you -?" he coughed when I settled my knees beside his hip.

I kissed him, again, maybe for the last time. I let my hand wrap itself around the back of his neck, like it had wanted to, and then it slid, like his hand had, down over safe parts of him – hip, thigh – but nowhere was really safe. I promised myself that if he pushed me away, if he humiliated me now, I would be done with this, whatever this was, this terrible rock of an idea I couldn't stop worrying.

I knew he'd been thinking about it, too. I caught him watching me, his lips a little full, a little open. During training, he locked my arms, our thighs wedged together, and everything shifted for a moment. He froze, our faces inches apart, his breath suddenly slow, and his eyes darted to my lips. "Don't drop your shoulder," he said then, too loud, untangling himself from me.

There was every good reason not to rest my hand on the swell of his tricep, not to press my chest against his, not to risk slipping my tongue along his top lip. Our survival depended on working together; couldn't this tear us apart, wreck everything, complicate our partnership beyond repair? Maybe. Yes. But.

He didn't send me away. He didn't say another word. He let me kiss him, let my lips be soft against his, strong against his. He let me unbutton the fabric hiding his chest, let me sweep my hungry palms across his skin while his fingers raked desperate lines up the backs of my thighs. No, by the time his hands were on me, it wasn't about letting me anymore. I think it was about letting himself.

He hissed at my lips on his skin, when I pressed them into the hollow of his sternum, sucked at the place where his pulse raced. At first I was surprised by how sensitive his body was, for a fighter like him, but then I knew. His senses keep him alive. He's good because he feels everything. I feathered fingertips over his ribs; his head fell back with a moan. Everything.

He wrenched his pants down to his ankles, still under me but strong enough to lift me with just his hips. I eased him back to the floor, straddling him, hard and throbbing and nestled against him, sliding along the hot length of him, already slick. I reached between us, held his cock, heavy and wide, in my hand. I ran my thumb over the tip; another hiss, as he knocked his head against the cold ground. Then he went silent, breathless, as I worked myself onto him, slowly.

"Careful," I whispered, my voice nearly as low as his.

Our hips began to roll, his into mine, mine into his. It wasn't what I had expected – I don't know what I expected, sneaking up to him, naked and hard, in the dead of night. But it wasn't a mistake and I know he knew it, too. His eyes fluttered closed, his body thrown gloriously open beneath me. My cock was painfully hard, fallen against him, tracing along the line of hair that snaked up to his navel. He took me in his fist, squeezing and pulling in time with our thrusts, faster and faster until I shuddered and his breath came out in a roar.

* * *

He's the better hunter. He's had more practice. And now he hunts me. When he finds me, he's wild-eyed, wordless. Venomous. And hungry from a year without me.

I'm inside him fast. Beneath me, he grinds his cock and his face into the muddy leaves. There's no room for my hand, and I want to tell him everything I didn't say, and that I'm sorry I filled him full of poison and ruined him forever, but there's no room for that, either.

* * *

I couldn't get enough of him. Training sessions were foreplay and we fucked anywhere, everywhere.

Up against a tree, both of us ridiculous with pants around our ankles and me glad as hell for his hands around my cock, squeezing in time and protecting it from the sharp bark. Afterward, he didn't flinch as he washed his bleeding knuckles in the salt ocean.

In the cold evening sand, my face buried in his lap, lips stretched, mouth utterly filled. His open hands laying lightly on my head. Drunk on the animal smell of him, taste of him.

In the fuselage, stretched under his thick body, both of us bare and yearning. We kissed into each other, sliding cock along cock until we couldn't stand it anymore and he dove into me, his breath gravel against my neck.

* * *

When Shado came, we stopped. Cold.

Very cold.

* * *

My hair was always falling in my eyes while we were training. I had to flick it back just to see. Exasperated that day, he caught me up before I could block, doubling me over with a bruising strike to my gut.

"Done," he grunted.

Then he headed back; I fumed but followed. Done? Inside the fuselage, he grabbed a knife and a bowl. I followed him back out again. "What are you -?"

He knelt in front of a shrub. Grabbed two fistfuls of leaves. "Cutting your hair."

"Not with a knife you're not." But I followed him to the beach.

The leaves made a sort of lather with the sea water, slimy and yellow. He cleaned the knife with water and sand, then sharpened it against a stone. "Take off your shirt," he told me.

I shot him a glance. He didn't look at me, just raised his eyebrow. He was a deadly flirt.

I stripped to the waist and knelt in the sand beside him. Despite his explosive strength, his hands could be so delicate. He massaged the lather through my hair. "You'll be glad for this step," he whispered at my ear. I was, if only for the gift of his hands suddenly soft in my hair.

When he picked up the knife, I laughed – at him, at me, at the knife we both had used to gut fish and birds and reptiles, to hack them apart before we roasted them or didn't. That knife was a screwdriver, a fork, a threat. And a razor, but only for the well-worn skin of chins and cheeks, skin that was used to a hard rake like this. Not for virgin scalp. He nodded, then began to shave me from my hairline in, all the way around my head. The slime was a pathetic substitute for shaving cream. There was a lot of scraping, a lot of blood. But he was right, I was glad it was there.

I'd never been bald. It was a kind of naked I'd never felt before. We stripped down right there in the sand and he kissed me while he rinsed my head – I hissed at the salt sting.

"Aw, does it hurt, Sally?" he taunted.

I held his hips and thrust against him. "You know I'm not any kind of Sally."

He groaned when I bit his lower lip, and we fucked long and deep where the water met the shore.

* * *

I don't try to find him. I know what he's capable of. All I want is to see him, to know he's okay.

He's not okay.

And seeing him doesn't come close to all I want. I want the sand under me and him – the old him – over me, inside me, surrounding me. I want that moment again when he hovers above my mouth, then sinks into a groaning kiss.

* * *

I couldn't make my face look hopeful. It wouldn't look anything but horrified.

Shado was closer, kneeling beside him. We never stood close after she came. He took her hair in his hand, stared at it like it had a secret to tell him, and he said, "I should have told you."

"Told you what?" she asked him and all three of us knew he wasn't talking to her. She knew, eventually, that when she caught him watching us it wasn't because of her. No matter how much he flirted with her. She knew and she never confronted me. Maybe she confronted him.

"How I felt about you."

That was the second to last time I failed him. When I didn't respond. A flood of clichés filled my head about how I had loved him, still loved him with a part of me I hadn't recognized before him. About what he had been to me, still was to me, how I longed for him, how I needed him, even just one more time. Inside my head, I begged him not to die.

But I was silent. He was finally speaking about this, about us, after a year of barbed silence. And I couldn't even breathe, let alone say any fucking thing at all.

"Do it," he growled.

* * *

He hummed when he took a piss, some low, tuneless tune, always the same.

"Sing for me," I prodded one night while he pulled his shirt over his head.

He coughed a laugh. "I don't sing," he told me, extra low and raspy, to prove it.

"Yeah you do. I like it."

He had slept beside me for few months by then, skin against blessed skin, hot and smooth. He actually slept this way, his breath even, rumbling like a furnace.

He paused, his broad, scarred back still facing me, his face hidden. "I don't sing," he insisted, flatter this time. He clenched his fist once, twice. "Princess."

I grinned in the dark. "Fine. You don't sing. When you piss."

He twisted to look at me. "What?"

"Come to bed."

"I do not."

I knelt, reaching my hand around the nape of his neck, tugging his stubborn face toward mine. An inch away from my open lips, he repeated, "I don't." I just nodded.

Sometimes I liked to rile him up.

He tossed me down to the ground and met me there, his face so close, still withholding his lips. He not at all carefully dug me out of my pants and, with a look that could melt glass, slid his fist slowly up and down.

I reached for him but he batted my hand away.

His sensitivity, his awareness, everything that made him such an intimidating opponent (and ally) – he trained all of it on me, on my response. My eyelids melted closed; he squeezed gently, at the base. A shudder; he slowed. My cock wept a first, slick tear; he bent to lick it away. I moaned then, low and long, as his lips parted and he sucked me inside. He refused to let it build, holding my hips to keep me anchored, to maintain control. If I was going to come, it was going to be him that got me there, only him.

It might have taken hours. My lips swelled, unkissed. My balls throbbed, unspent, hitting the point of _almost_ more times than I could count. I was incoherent, burned nearly through, and he knew it, he'd done that. So that when he decided it was time - probably after I'd heatedly said things I could never take back - leaning his thigh between my legs, finally giving me his lips, he pulled even, slow strokes tighter and tighter until I exploded under him.

Then he curled beside me, my eyes still closed, the narcotic, well-fucked fog settling over me. And he hummed me to sleep.

* * *

Sara knows it's not safe to come out here alone. We both know it. Ivo and his men will kill us, or worse. But she doesn't say a thing.

Slade isn't safe either. I'm going to have to do something, maybe soon.

But not yet.


	2. Watching

_Hello, dear friends. I've been doing some thinking about Slade/Oliver. Turns out I'm not ready to put a period on this story yet. So: I will strive at all times to avoid painting their island relationship as abusive, because I don't believe it was, and because I'm not interested in writing that. But I'm offering fair warning: on Arrow (and hell, in life), the past and the present have a way of telling the same story._

_As ever, thanks to latbfan and to CreepingMuse, both superheroes. If you are not reading latbfan's **How Was Your Day?** and **All I Want For Christmas?**, you are missing the good stuff (and she has kindly left room in the latter for the possibilities I present in this fic, so double thanks); for similarly stunning insight and glorious writing, check out CreepingMuse's Sleepy Hollow fic, **She and He**._

**Watching**

Felicity stammers that I should at least wait, but she doesn't insist because she can see I can't. I can't even sit down. She knows what it feels like to have your home invaded: the unrelenting spin of regret, the endless litany of what you did wrong, what you should have done, or done differently.

She went after her villain and I am damn well going after mine.

"2500 block of Washington, south side," Felicity calls after me.

* * *

"Don't make me say it," he rumbled against my neck.

"You don't have to -"

He sniffed. Looked out over the water. "I fucking miss you."

My head dropped, but he lifted it toward him with a calloused palm. "I just can't," I started, twisting my chin away. Not anymore. Shado could return any second and we wouldn't hear her coming. She was silent as a spirit.

He glared at me: _you just can't what?_

"Don't make me say it," I finally whispered.

* * *

A fucking DeLorian. Only an asshole would drive a DeLorian. But Slade was always clueless about shit like that, about pop culture references he should have known. It's not like he was born on the island. Who doesn't know about Star Wars? Or Back to the Future?

I jab the back bumper with my boot as I walk by it.

I contemplate kicking the door down (sweeter, more satisfying than a dent in his idiot car), but a quick twist of the knob confirms that he's arrogant enough to have left the damn thing unlocked. Just inside, I let the heavy metal slam back into its frame; the crash echoes up the grate stairs. _Knock, knock, asshole._ It's nearly as deafening as the metallic twang of a fist against the fuselage – mine, his. Eventually, they sounded the same.

I take the stairs two at a time and shake out my hands when I crest the landing. There's another thick metal door here, cracked just barely open. The Slade I used to know would warn me that I'm walking into a trap. He'd berate me for even showing up here, head clogged with plan-compromising feelings.

But I don't even have a plan.

It haunts me that I could have saved him. If I had killed Ivo when I had the chance, everything would have been different. I could have found an antidote for the mirakuru. And I could have chosen him again. We could have returned to Starling City together.

He's here now, alive, and it's all wrong. He invaded my house, flirted with my mother, fondled every last piece of art in my father's collection. Smiling like the cat that ate the canary. Leering like a pirate in a pressed navy suit.

He blathered niceties in hallway after hallway, my mother's arm folded over his, and all I could hear was the blaring blame of that eye patch: _You did this to me. You couldn't kill me, you couldn't save me. All you could do was poke a hole in my face._

I have to finish what I started. Or at least end what he's started.

"Don't just stand there, Lucy. Come in."

* * *

He stomped down the stairs so I knew he was coming. All the rest of the prisoners were either gone or dead. He threaded his fingers between the rails of my cage. I felt his angry gaze on me, sometimes for hours.

"You let him kill Shado." His voice echoed in the empty hold.

Hinges squealed as he opened the door, then whined higher as he shut it again. He never shot me in the cage. Never touched me.

"After everything. A whole year. Every day, you chose her. Over me."

Of course it was more complicated than that. And more nuanced. The first few days, when Shado was new, Slade and I didn't touch. She wouldn't have felt welcome, I thought, in a closed pair. We were being polite. He went back to sleeping on the other side of the fuselage. We were almost never alone. We both appeared okay. And then things with Shado and me grew so quickly. It didn't feel like a choice, at first. And then, before I realized it, it was too late.

But Slade was right. I let it happen. I could have told Shado who Slade was to me. I could have stopped that first kiss. Even after the first, or the hundredth, I could have stopped it. In any of thousands of moments that year, I could have chosen him again. It hurt, physically hurt to sleep near him and not with him, night after night, in the fuselage. I missed him. No, miss isn't even the word for it. Is there a word for that kind of ache?

"And then, when it's life and death, you choose someone else. What does that make _me_? If she's not worth saving, _what the fuck am I?_"

* * *

"It was such a pleasure to see Sarah again."

I glare from the doorway at the back of his head, my body clenched like a fist.

"And to finally meet your mother. Nothing like the smell of a rich woman."

"Shut up," I seethe.

"Lonely, I'd hazard. Could use a good fuck."

"Goddamn it, shut up."

"And Roy -"

I draw fast. The point of my arrow just kisses the back of his head.

* * *

"I want to watch," Slade whispered, sliding his fist up and off of me, slipping away into the dark.

"Watch what?" I breathed, arching my hips, offering myself to him again. "Come back."

"I want to watch you make yourself come."

"It's too dark. I can't even see your face." It wasn't much of an argument; he was in shadow but I lay where the moonlight streamed in. We could both see that my bare skin was bathed in a faint glow.

Slade was silent.

"Come back here and fuck me, Slade."

Still nothing.

My body was swollen and charged. His fault. "Sex by myself is the boring kind of sex. One of the perks of me and you is, you know, _me and you_."

"You're not by yourself. I'm here. Watching."

I considered turning over and going to sleep just to spite him. I'd pay for it the next day – Slade would be relentless in training. Even more than usual. But I didn't have to do what he wanted. It was my decision.

"Trust me, Oliver."

I looked up at the ceiling. Closed my eyes, exasperated. But I wrapped my fingers into a fist around the base of my cock.

Maybe I could.

I had to admit, my skin was suddenly much more sensitive under his gaze. Almost hungry. And my nipples could cut glass. My hips churned upward against my hand. Once.

Okay.

Again.

A wispy groan escaped my lips. Then his, which made it so much worse. Or better. I pulled a languid stroke, imagining him above me while the warm breeze of his gaze grazed my skin. My mouth fell open. I licked my bottom lip.

"Jesus."

"Shut up."

I rolled my hips, let my knees fall to each side, settled into my rhythm. His eyes on me were like another pair of hands, or lips – they sucked at my neck, feathered down my ribs. I arched up into his gaze and heard Slade exhale in response.

I was on the edge, and if I were alone I would already be past it, but not now. I slowed down. My other hand, splayed at my hip, edged down, past my cock. First my balls –gentle pressure to mimic what I imagined it would feel like for Slade to suck them into his mouth. I ground upward, into his phantom mouth, hoping he was taking notes. Then, after a quick slide across the slick tip of my cock, I slid my middle finger down further and pushed just the pad inside.

He groaned.

I was drunk under the double gaze of the moonlight and my hidden lover. I pulled faster, squeezing along my length while my other hand swirled the kind of slow circles he would never have the patience to grant me. And as the unstoppable wave began, I thrust into my fist and fucked the air and his waiting, imagined mouth.

* * *

He stands, turns slowly to face me. I keep my arrow aimed at his head while he watches me steadily. "Déjà vu," he says.

"You need to get out of Starling City," I tell him instead of killing him.

"Your mother would lose the election if you drove me out of town. If I'm not mistaken, I'm her largest donor." He smirks, a hint of the old deadly flirt. "Well, probably the largest."

"Seriously?" My voice cracks. Fuck. "You're making dick jokes?"

He steps toward me an inch, pressing his eye patch against the tip of my arrow. There really isn't anything under there at all. Before I can stop myself I shrink away from the hole, not so much that anyone could see it, but he feels it.

His grin spreads wider.

I swallow and dig in. "You want me to suffer, Slade? Believe me, I've suffered."

He shakes his head. The point of my arrow scrapes a slim line into the leather. "That's not good enough. I want to watch."

* * *

Cuddly Slade was the biggest surprise. Rare and precious. In the morning, when it was warm and we'd trained and eaten well the day before – and, I suspected, when he had dreamed of something safe and calm – I woke to his lips soft on my neck and his hard cock nestled against mine.

He held me, chest to chest. His heartbeat was inevitably faster than mine at first, but soon mine caught up. His palms lay flat against me, firm and unhurried.

He slid his arm under my neck, offering his bicep as a pillow. I slid my arm under his side, pulling him even closer. We hummed with even slight movement. We buried ourselves in each other's necks, in the hollow of collarbones. And we savored it as our cocks and bellies grew slick, sliding against each other without intervening fists, urgency surfacing slowly.

He rolled on top of me, wrapped his palms around my shoulders as mine found his thighs, the swell of his ass, the V of his lower back. His breath against my ear, my head thrown back, we pressed slow thrusts against each other in the brightening morning light.

* * *

I force my voice as dark and smooth as I can get it. "Stay away from my family. Stay out of my house."

Slade pans the shaft of my arrow off target with thick, steady fingers. "Oliver. I don't need to be inside. I'm already watching you."


	3. Attempts

_A quick chapter before the next episode airs... Thanks to CreepingMuse for reminding me about how sexy blowjob scenes can be. Thanks to latbfan for the idea of the camera in the bathroom. Thanks to every one of you, gentle readers. And if any of you are not already reading latbfan's **All I Want for Christmas**, her most recent chapter included a delicious nod to Oliver's sexual history with Slade. Not to be missed, and remember to tell her how much you liked it.  
_

* * *

I see the small, black cube, no bigger than the face of my watch, wedged just under the mirror over the sink and I know.

This is why Slade touched every damn frame.

This is why he excused himself into this bathroom, why his eyes darted to me when he twisted the door knob.

He's watching. Literally, this is what he meant.

I don't inspect it. I don't let on. Instead I stare into the mirror, knowing he can see me clear as day. Here I am, Slade. Slow and late and useless. You want to see me? Here I fucking am.

* * *

"Stop, stop, stop," I cooed, bracing his shoulders against a tree trunk.

He growled and tore at the top button of my pants.

I held his wrists. "Slade. Stop."

His breath rushed in hard puffs against my face.

"I want to help you. Come back with me. There's got to be something in Yao Fei's stash that can filter the poison out of your system."

He glared at me, eyes wild.

"Let me fix it, Slade." There was more: _I miss you, I wanted to save your life, I'm sorry I let you go, I'm sorry for everything._ I didn't say a word of it.

Slade tilted his head back like he was savoring rain on his face. I could have pressed my lips to the hollow of his neck then. I could have bent my knees and begun low, my chest against his cock, and slid up him until I reached the sensitive spot where his pulse raced under his skin. Maybe I could have gotten through to him that way, telling him with my body instead of with words. Maybe his head would have tilted forward, his lips wet and open, ready for mine.

* * *

"I don't want to kill him. I know, I know I have to, but I don't want to."

Sara stood, captured my trembling face in her hands. "I know."

"I don't know what to do. I don't know how to stop it." He was always stronger, faster. He knew my weaknesses, because I had volunteered every damn one.

Sara said it again: "You start by letting people help you." The truth I couldn't accept.

"But he's going to come after you." _And Digg, and Felicity, until everyone else is dead. Until my heart is a burned out shell, until I'm the same dry husk of a person that he is._

She gave me a wry smile. "Let him come. I'm not that easy to kill."

* * *

He was there. It had been weeks since I had touched him, since I had seen more than a glimpse of him. I woke to footsteps just outside the fuselage, not three feet away from where he knew I slept. I rose in the inky dark, swallowed my guilt and fear, and hoped that this time he wouldn't vanish.

I just needed it to stop.

* * *

He was there.

The hairs on the back of my neck bristled, and like Slade taught me, I obeyed that sixth sense and went to investigate. But all I found was a torn up mask with an arrow through its eye.

What did I expect? Did I really think he'd parade himself out in the open? He didn't want to be found. Not this time.

* * *

We weren't even training when I tore a jagged gash in his flank. He was stripped to the waist, rinsing off a day's accumulated sweat and dirt, while he described the last meal he'd eaten at his favorite restaurant back home: a thick, rare steak slathered with butter sauce, sauteed carrots and asparagus anointed with roasted garlic, a crisp, heady beer. His eyes rolled back as he remembered it.

"Quit teasing me," I snapped and leaned over to push at him, just barely. But I caught him against the sharp edge of the make-shift table. "Oh shit, oh God," I rambled as the blood welled.

He was calm. "Inside," he directed, pushing me into the fuselage.

I pulled my shirt over my head and pressed it to the wound. "Hold that," I insisted. I was frantic.

He smiled serenely. "If you say so, nurse."

"Shut the fuck up. It's gonna get infected. You could die." How could he be so calm?

"I'm not gonna die. We've got Yao Fei's stash. And a needle and thread."

"No! No, I can't. Stitches? You want me to _sew your skin_?"

He nodded and pressed his side harder.

"Are you kidding me?!"

His voice was nothing but a low rumble. "Whose fault is this, Veronica?"

We both gritted our teeth when I eased my blood-soaked shirt away. I poured our drinking water over the wound, more than we could really spare. "Jesus," I whispered when the tear was clean enough to really see it.

"Make the stitches small and tight, got it?"

"But if they're small, I'll have to do more. It'll be so much worse."

Slade licked his lips and handed me the needle and thread.

Every jab and tug registered on his face. I saw them in the lines around his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the twinge of his lip. But he was silent and more patient than I was. "Don't rush," he told me more than once.

When it was done, I crushed a handful of Yao Fei's herbs, mixed with water and a little of the clay that lay just under the island's topsoil, and I smeared them over the puckering, irregular stitches. "Done," I told him.

He sighed and sat back, cringing, while I rinsed the clay off my hands.

It plainly hurt like hell. "What can I do?" I asked.

"Leave me alone," he drawled, tensing against the pain as he twisted into a more comfortable position.

"I could…" Nothing, no idea what I could do. I knelt in front of him, lay my hands lightly just above his knees, and looked pathetic.

"Not helping," he grumbled.

His breaths were slow and shallow; he was trying not to move. If only I had something to kill the pain… Advil, morphine, if he could do a speed run around the island… something to get his endorphins flying.

Or.

I unbuttoned the top button of his pants, then the second.

"What are you doing?" he asked through his teeth, his body rigid as a plank.

"Administering cutting edge pain-killing technology." I gave him my flirtiest, Slade-iest grin.

The corner of his mouth turned up as his eyelids fluttered closed. It was the closest I expected to get to assent, so I took it.

I pulled him gently out from the tight fabric around his hips, easing his pants down enough that he didn't have to move. I cradled his soft cock in my hand, vulnerable as a baby bird, and touched my lips to the tip once, then again. Slade's breath calmed a little. I kissed it like it was Slade's tongue, like a first, tentative French kiss. I licked a swirl around it, first in a shallow spiral and then further, letting it grow to fill my mouth.

Slade exhaled a deep sigh.

I tightened my lips around him, dragging them slowly up and off. "Better?"

"This isn't going to work," he mumbled.

Maybe it wasn't. But if I could ease the suffering I'd caused for a while, I had to try. Not that I needed an excuse – by then, reasons to suck his dick had ranged from "it was sunny" to "hours of successful/unsuccessful training were over" to "he is Slade and that's a reason." So I pressed my tongue into a point and traced the vein that ran down his length, then sucked him into my mouth.

I couldn't hold his hips the way I knew he liked. I couldn't rake my fingers up over his ribs or lean on his thighs to push them further apart. Touching or moving any other part of him would hurt him even more than I already had. All I could do was suck and squeeze and lick, coaxing him to stay hard, until his breath began to match my rhythm. His breath hitched; I felt him swell and stretch. I was right: his body was already looser, calmer under my devotion.

Gradually I increased my speed, driving him toward the release I was pretty sure would give him real relief. His head fell back, his strong neck gloriously exposed, but I denied myself the pleasure of it beneath my lips. I gave him more, and more, and more until I almost gave up hope, and then came the groan I wanted to hear, deep in his throat. I echoed it, I couldn't help it, and when he came I sucked down every last drop.

After a moment, I sat back on my heels and wiped my lips. "You feel better now, don't you?"

He nodded lightly, his grin now no more than a faint wisp around the eyes.

* * *

_How is it possible, after everything that's happened, that I look the same? How do I have the same face? Marks, tattoos, lumps of scar tissue pressing out from under my skin, but this face doesn't show a trace of it._

I stare into the mirror and it feels like surrender. You want to look, Slade? I'm not going to stop you. Look at me, look at the sum of all my failed attempts.

And then a seed of an idea sprouts. Why didn't I think of it before?

Sara's right: I need to let someone help me. One particular someone.


	4. Memory

_I'm veering slightly from canon now (okay, slightly **more**). According to me, Barry Allen is still just an adorkable scientist with a crush on Felicity (get in line, Barry). And because it is far more poetic, Slade did Oliver's tattoo his own damn self._

_This is for you precious few lovelies who see the beauty in this oh-so-crack ship, whether or not you leave me love notes about it. Thank you for reading. And for latbfan and CreepingMuse, who DO leave me love notes: your support keeps me sane._

* * *

"This is Oliver Queen."

I hear rustling over the line. "Oh, um, hi. Sir."

"I need your help."

"Is Felicity okay?" he asks, suddenly frantic.

I remind myself that he is important. Useful. "She's fine."

"Good, good."

"Barry."

"Sir?"

"I need you to make me an antidote."

* * *

I didn't realize it at first – slapping water felt like a waste of time – but the soreness snuck in, and with it, anger. When they subsided, they left a kind of numbness. Acceptance.

I flopped in front of the embers that would be a fire again when the dusk settled, and I watched Shado hone arrowheads. She sat with her back to me. Her shoulders undulated with the repetitive task, muscles moving beneath her pale skin, animating her dragon tattoo.

"You have a tattoo," I said dumbly.

She stilled, then carried on without answering.

"I never got a tattoo."

She set down one arrow and picked up another.

"But it looks good on you."

"Not the point," she said to me without turning around.

"What is?" I asked.

She lay the arrow across her lap. "Memory. The mind is an unreliable archive. But the body can't forget."

* * *

Barry clears his throat. "An antidote?"

"Something like what you used to save me."

"The rat poison, right. It kept you from absorbing the mirakuru."

"Could you make something that would block its effects in someone who survived it? Someone who's had it in his system longer?"

I can hear Barry swallowing into the phone, a loud, slow gulp. "I don't know. How much longer?"

"Years."

* * *

We spent a good part of one morning looking for the right tree, with the right configuration of branches. Slade broke the thick, green branches down to stubs with his bare hands.

"For blocking. Sides here," he indicated, smashing his forearm against the stub on the left, then the right. "Above, below." More smashing, in a speedy blur.

I nodded, dazed.

"What are you waiting for?" he growled.

I took his place. Behind me, he squared my hips to face the tree with strong, only recently familiar hands.

"Sides first."

Recreating his demonstration, I met the amputated branch with my right forearm.

"You gonna waltz with it next, Suzie? Come on!"

With a snort, I bashed the branch, scraping a shallow groove in my skin.

"Again. From here," he said, reaching around me to center his fist above my navel.

I bashed it twice more.

"Combo. One, two," he instructed.

I went for the left, then the right, clumsy and already bleeding. "Seems slow."

"'S what practice is for. Don't come back till it's dark."

* * *

"It's just," Barry blurts. "I mean, by now the serum has set up shop. It's changed shit around, made the place its own. I don't know if it would work."

"Try," I insist.

Barry sighs. "When do you need it?"

"How soon can you finish it?"

"Mmmm," he simmers. "Two weeks?"

"Tomorrow." Even that is too long.

"What? Not a chance."

"Look. What if I told you everyone's safety depended on you getting this done?"

"I'm not actually all that great under pressure, Mr. Queen."

"Especially Felicity's."

I hear his breath over the phone line. "Fine, yeah, okay. I'll meet you at the train station in Central City tomorrow at six."

* * *

By the time I came back to the fuselage, dusk was settling into night. There was a flickering glow and the smell of roasting meat.

Which was a relief, because I couldn't lift my arms anymore.

I stripped the bark off the broken branches after Slade left. Once they were smooth, I began again. Side blocks, top-side combos. Triples. And eventually, I could move in a continuous stream. I didn't stop until I could do it fast and right.

I didn't do it for him. I did it for me, because it was important to me to be useful.

That's not true. It was a little for him. But mostly for me.

"Hungry?" he asked when I ducked into the fuselage.

I collapsed across the fire from him, my heavy arms dangling. "You offering?"

Not long before then, he would have told me to go kill my own damn dinner. While licking his fingers.

"Here," he said instead, breaking off a steaming strip of meat from the roasting carcass. He came around and sat beside me. "Here."

I winced as I tried to take it. My arms were made of lead.

"Hurts, I know. But you can block a strike now."

I couldn't even shrug. "Better than yesterday, I guess."

He tore a smaller piece from the strip and held it in front of my mouth. "Here," he said again. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth for him.

* * *

He strung me up by my wrists, against a grate, and left me there. The blood drained quickly from my arms, replaced by a dull throb. Hours passed. Shouts, footsteps, gunshots. Doors slammed below deck.

He didn't say anything when he came back. But then I heard a whir and felt the first strange prick of metal in skin.

"What are you doing?" I demanded, twisting in the air.

"Hold still," he growled.

* * *

"I'm going to be useless tomorrow," I said to the dark. "I know, I know, I'm useless now."

Slade slept alone back then. We both did. What we had, what we were, was still unnamed.

"Arms sore?"

_Sore_ didn't begin to cover it.

"You need to rub the muscles around your shoulder joint. It'll help."

"Great. As soon as my arms work again, I'll be sure to do that."

After a few minutes, I felt his thigh brush my hip as he knelt beside me. "Like this," he rumbled, taking my left arm. He pressed along my tricep with the heel of his palm until he reached my shoulder. Then, with steady pressure, he pulled long strokes over my trapezius.

I sighed. He pulled my shirt off and continued. Our skin grew warmer through friction and contact. Once the muscle was loose, he began to roll my shoulder socket in gentle circles. I gave over control at his silent insistence. He lay my arm out to the side and pushed his thumbs over my bicep in deep strokes.

"You're not useless," he finally said. He dragged curved fingers across my chest, then up the sides of my neck, into my hair. "You're not," he repeated, his lips open and swollen just above mine.

Those moments before he kissed me. Those pauses to confirm that it was me and it was him. Those deliberate, vulnerable breaths. They were the best thing about the island.

And then he melted against me, tongue and lips and hum and moan.

* * *

Barry pulls a small injection vial out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

I reach for it.

"Don't," he begins, flinching away. "Just, be careful." He places the vial in the palm of my open hand. "It's extremely corrosive."

"Will it work?"

"If it doesn't kill him." He grins, then stops. "I mean, yes. I hope."

"Okay," I say, tucking it into my pocket.

"If I had more time, I could refine the formula -"

"But you don't."

He nods heavily. "Yeah. So I hope you don't like the guy much."

I grimace, swallowing hard.

He continues, almost apologetically. "Because, look, it's going to hurt like hell going in. And whether or not it works, that injection's going to leave an ugly scar. It's going to warp the skin all around it. Like a smallpox vaccine only much, much worse. You'll mark him for life."

* * *

I thought I knew how to let go but with Slade, vulnerability felt new. Brighter. That night, with the fingers of one hand laced in my hair and his other hand squeezing and pulling along the length of my cock, I came groaning grateful, incoherent variations of his name as he sucked and bit a welt into the base of my throat.


	5. Lost and Found

_Here we are, friends. The end of this story. Or the beginning of something new. I never know, at moments like these. I owe continued gratitude to latbfan, whose glorious stories __**All I Want for Christmas**__ and __**How Was Your Day?**__ have bravely made room for a slashy Slade/Oliver past. (I can't imagine that you aren't reading them by now, but if you aren't, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR.) There is a nod here to her characterization of Felicity in this chapter – hers is, I maintain, the absolutely most perfect and wonderful in the entire Arrow universe, actual show included. Thanks also to CreepingMuse, extraordinary writer of the Sleepy Hollow fic __**She and He**__ and fic-quiet Arrow analyst, who has provided much-needed perspective on this show, these characters, writing, and life._

* * *

His lips first, just his lips.

* * *

"It's over, Oliver. You've got nothing, not your family. Your friends. Not your little team. You've lost everyone. It's just me and you."

"It's always been me and you, Slade."

Hidden in shadow, his breath sounded the same. God, it sounded exactly the same.

* * *

I couldn't focus on prepping with Sara. Target practice was a joke and getting worse. I was increasingly useless, just when I had to be ready to take the freighter.

Because I needed to tell him. Finally. I needed to say every true thing I had been too weak to say. Until I did, I was going to keep fucking everything up.

Frozen, bow taut, I stared silently at the target while Sara sorted and stashed equipment across the fuselage. "Would you please get out of here? I can't think with all that noise," she said, grinning at me over her shoulder.

I found Slade crouched beside a tree, reassembling a gun. He heard me long before I could see him, but he let me come. And I didn't force him to look at me, just stood behind him and spoke through my teeth. "I did this to you," I told him after several shallow, tight breaths. "I didn't know what the mirakuru would do – I shouldn't have offered it like a lifeline."

Maybe he was listening. Not that I said what really mattered. The mirakuru was the least of my sins, the easiest to admit. Anticipating the release of the real truth my body tensed against itself, fists clenching, throat closing. The familiar paralysis set in.

I tried to clear my throat. I shook my hands like I was trying to flick my fingers off. "Slade. I want. I." I couldn't imagine getting any words out.

Inside my head, I admitted and begged and pledged and bled. But between us, where it mattered, there was only silence. Eventually he jumped to his feet, shoved his gun in his waistband, and walked away.

* * *

Then his hand, still warm from sleep, on my forearm. The weight of it, the width of it, is pure relief.

* * *

"Absolutely not. I refuse." Felicity crossed her arms across her chest, jutting her chin out with the improbable fierceness I love. And rely on.

"You can't refuse. I'm your boss. _Was_ your boss." She reared her head back, ready with a torrent of argument, but to keep them both alive I couldn't let her win. "He knows about you now, both of you. You have to get as far away from here as you can. You have to make it look like you've given up on me."

"I'm not going anywhere," Diggle countered, glaring at me from behind Felicity.

"This isn't." I clenched and unclenched my jaw. "This isn't up for discussion. I have to do it alone."

"Alone? No. Okay, yes, in the field I may be more of a liability than an asset, and I may or may not be having mini PTSD flashbacks of bombs and shrapnel and you saving me, again, but you need us. So there will be no firing. I mean, I'd like to see you _try_ to dismantle my system." Felicity feathered her fingers over her keyboard, petting it like a cat. "You can't fire us. We're backing you up, with or without your permission. I mean, stealthily. Well, and Digg -"

"We're in," he interrupted.

"But, yeah, you couldn't get rid of us, even if you actually wanted to."

I didn't deserve their allegiance. But I knew how lucky I was to have it. "When did you get so stubborn?"

* * *

My fingers in his hair, again. His lips open; my eyes close. One of us whimpers.

* * *

I fell to my knees and gathered him up. His head rolled against my left bicep. The leather strap of his eye patch pulled at my skin. As he writhed there, two poisons fighting inside him, I cradled his heavy body in my lap. He wasn't dead. Yet.

I brushed his gray hair from his forehead, slick now with sweat. My breath hitched in my throat but I managed to lift his eye patch. I had to see it. Both his eyes were closed but what was missing was unmistakable: his right eyelid fell, concave, into the hole I left him with.

I let the patch settle back in place. "Stay with me. Please."

His eye fluttered open, then closed again. He panted, grimacing. I laid my palm on his sternum, as if my touch could calm him. Ridiculous. But I had found words that meant something, even if he couldn't hear them.

And once I found them, there were more. The right words finally tumbled out of me.

"I loved you, Slade. I loved you on the island. I was wrong not to tell you."

Did his breath come smoother, slower?

"I loved you when we were alone, I loved you when Shado came. Me and Shado was a mistake, it was habit. It was me being the way I always was, lazy and careless. And I've wanted to tell you I'm sorry ever since."

His fingers tensed into a claw.

"Finally touching you again, Slade, I can't – if this is it, it's enough. I missed you, maybe it doesn't matter, but I did. I've never missed anyone the way I missed you. Do you have any idea how I've missed you since you changed, since you hated me? God, since you came back? You hurt me, you tried to ruin my life, but I know it's my fault. I deserved it. What I did to you was so much worse. And through all of it, I still loved you every fucking second."

* * *

He was always his most arrogant when he was winning. And I was obviously losing, standing alone, with no bow, no hood. But the moment he swaggered into the light, I threw my hidden dart – loaded, my only one - at his heart.

Bull's eye.

He clutched at it. His knees buckled. His entire body bowed, taut, and he fell to the ground.

Would it kill him? Would the mirakuru neutralize its effects?

Would it work?

* * *

I cradle his head, his hair soft on my palm, and hold his lips to mine.

* * *

I fell silent again. His struggle grew quieter until his body was soft. I carried him through room after room until I found a bed.

There was a time I would have unbuttoned his shirt, eased it off his shoulders. Reverently removed his pants, his shoes and socks, smoothing his legs down into the bed. Wrapped him in cool sheets, and then wrapped myself around him.

But I didn't have the right. Not after everything. Even sitting beside him, keeping this vigil, was more than I deserved.

* * *

"He's not dead," I told Felicity over the phone.

"Yay," she cheered, in a bright whisper. "And neither are you. Yay again! So, is he fixed?"

"I'll know when he wakes up."

Hours became a night.

* * *

His eyes blazed with hungry mischief when he stuck a finger through my belt loop and pulled my hips to his. He chuckled once, low in his throat, and bypassed my lips – ready, always ready - in favor of the hollow of my neck. He bent his knees and slid his body down to position his jaw just under mine. He sucked and pushed, his wide hands vices on my hips, and I was hard in an instant.

It was like that. And I ruined it.

* * *

"I hate sleeping with this thing," is the first thing he says. He tugs his eye patch off and tosses it across the bed.

I freeze.

He flexes his fingers, clenches them slowly, deliberately into a fist. He pushes himself up, rolling his head on his neck. It takes forever. Then he turns to me, both eyes open. One a hole.

"Jesus."

"Not quite."

I cough a startled laugh. "Are you…?"

He breathes deeply, like he used to. "I feel different."

There's color in his cheeks. I can't close my mouth.

Slowly, he fingers the bloody hole I made in his shirt. "You shot me," he remembers.

"Sort of."

Is he okay? He might be. He seems somehow lighter.

"I feel different."

I nod, equal parts amazed and terrified. "Yeah. How, different?" I hazard.

"Better." He stretches an arm, then his neck. "Much better."

He unbuttons his shirt, peels it off, then pulls his t-shirt off. Over his heart, where the dart landed, blooms a mottled, deep purple scar, petaled and round like a gruesome rose. "I'm sorry," I hiss.

"Doesn't hurt."

It's too much. I can't breathe. If he's not cured, this will really be it. I will have lost absolutely everything. "Slade. Are you?" I swallow a mouthful of sour spit. "Are you better?"

"What did you do?" he asks, and I can't read him anymore. It has been far too long since he was himself. Since I was myself.

"It was an antidote," I attempt to explain. He drops his head and traces the huge scar on his chest. "I had to try. Did it work?"

He's quiet for a moment. And then, "I heard you."

No, it's impossible. He must mean something else, some other time. There is no way I could be lucky enough that he heard me while he was in the throes of being poisoned and is, at the same time, also miraculously cured. There is no way I get everything I want.

But then he lifts his head. "Come here," he says.

* * *

His lips first, just his lips. Then his hand, still warm from sleep, on my forearm. The weight of it, the width of it, is pure relief. My fingers in his hair, again. His lips open; my eyes close. One of us whimpers. I cradle his head, his hair soft on my palm, and hold his lips to mine.

I lower him back onto his pillow, sharply aware that he may not be entirely whole yet, may not even be telling me the truth. I'm aware but I'm reckless, too. I recklessly suck his tongue into my mouth, recklessly slide my hand along his bare chest, over the latest wound I gave him, still sickeningly hot. I slide it further, over his ribs, over the smooth scar from the gash I tore in him and sewed up again. His body ruthlessly tells our story.

"There you are," I breathe against his mouth. He rolls me under him and I remember everything, his weight on me, his arms enclosing us. "You heard me," I marvel.

His smirk is back, glorious as ever. "It's a little foggy. You may have to repeat some of it."

My laugh sounds like a sigh. Or a sob. He hovers above my lips, confirming that it is me and it is him. And then we are back again, melting into each other.

Our clothes are off quickly, cooperatively, like it used to be. He kicks the sheets to the foot of the bed, far out of the way. He's so much larger, more real like this, how I've remembered him. I kiss along his jaw, lick and lave his neck, down to the place it is widest, where my palm wants to rest. I want to dip further, to take a nipple between my teeth, but he pulls at my chin, he needs my lips again. We are both so desperate for each other, laughing and whimpering and grunting for more.

He presses his lips and his insistent jaw into my chest, into the hollow under my ribs, my belly. I let my fingers thread through his thick hair, let them lie lightly there as he licks the tip of my cock. I murmur his name, I murmur need and hope and apology. "Shhh," he whispers, lifting his head. "Shhh."

With his tongue, he draws spirals up and down before he takes me completely in his mouth. One long, sucking stroke and then he buries his face against my thigh, kissing and licking down the crease while he cups my ass in his hands. He tilts me up just enough but instead of a hard, wide finger it's his tongue I feel pressing inside, turning my guts to velvet.

He winds patient circles there but I'm impatient. I grab at his shoulders, try to pull him up. "Come back," I beg, and there he is, kneeling between my thighs. There's no smirk on his face now, nothing but that decadent delirium I remember from the best days on the island, when it was just us, when we knew exactly how to fuck each other and we took our time. His eyelids fall closed as he pushes inside me but I can't stop watching him. I have missed him so much.

* * *

"This all doesn't mean everything is perfect," he warns me, tracing a scar on my shoulder. A scar he gave me. "It's not. But."

I turn my head. We're nose to nose. "But?"

"But saving me is a good start."

THE END.


End file.
